Source Text
Bodhichitta is the unflinching longing to be awakened to the absolute as soon as possible, not for oneself but for all living beings.
The Bodhisattva’s Practices The bodhisattva has a complete path, and the six paramitas are what we can call the spiritual observances of the bodhisattvas. The six paramitas are generosity, discipline, tolerance (or courage or patience), diligence, meditation, and transcendent wisdom. Prajnaparamita, or transcendent wisdom, is the nonconceptual understanding of the absolute. Shantideva often said that of the six paramitas, the last one is the most important.
The ideal bodhisattva is not only someone who has the willingness to stay in samsara and awaken all beings, but also has the mental capacity to contemplate mahashunyata, the great emptiness, which turns out to be a very profound but also quite frightening truth for many people.
I have found a teaching like ambrosia, profound, peaceful, free from conception, luminous, uncreated. If I tell of this teaching, no one will understand. So I shall stay in the forest without speaking.
Emptiness here means empty of all concepts, empty of all struggles, empty of all duality, and empty of all notions of self—empty of all your ideas of who you are. Empty of your past and future, empty of birth and death, empty of duality between enemy and friends… empty of everything. It is the true nature of reality.
So to me, emptiness is not a theory. Ultimately, it is not something we can understand. It is an internal experience. It is a powerful process of letting go and dropping all our illusions, all the illusions that we are holding on to.
I feel that the process of awakening has two flavors: one is letting go and one is more like flourishing and blossoming. When I say flourishing and blossoming, I mean that you feel like you are arriving at a spiritual insight. You feel that your heart is blossoming; you feel that your love, your joy, your true freedom are blossoming and flourishing. You feel that you are thriving inside in a very non-egoic way. The other flavor of awakening is letting go. You feel you are letting go, you are dissolving. You are letting go of your attachment; you are letting go of your illusions. The process of letting go can be liberating, but it can sometimes be challenging, too, as if a rug has been pulled out from under you. It can feel like we are directly destroying the world we know, the world that we have been living in. It is like a huge paradigm shift in our understanding of what reality is. This is not always an easy process to digest.
Dzogchen master Prahevajra said, Intellectual understanding is like a patch on clothes. It will fall off eventually. Meditative experiences are like mist. They will dissolve. Realization is like Mount Meru, unshakable. It will not perish.
Samadhi Raja Sutra, Pure and impure are conceptual extremes. Compounded and uncompounded are conceptual extremes. Because of that, the intelligent ones let go of all conceptual extremes. They do not even reside in the middle.
Let me translate trö drel. It is a very important term, especially in the Nyingma tradition, whether you are studying Madhyamaka, Vajrayana, or Dzogchen. Trö drel means freedom from mental proliferation: trö means mental proliferation; drel means devoid of, or to be free. Trö drel and emptiness are almost like synonyms. Trö drel is often interpreted as a kind of nonconceptual truth that you can’t say anything about. It is beyond all forms of philosophical assertions.
AI Summary
The Fragrance of Emptiness by Anam Thubten presents key insights from the Taoism tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
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Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
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